2016 US Primary Election Features

US 2016 Primary Launches

Helping people understand how to participate

A key aspect of our work relates to being a "voter assistant" throughout the election cycle. Our first launch for the US General Election was a state-by-state guide of voter registration information.

Helping people learn about the candidates and issues

One of the biggest launches our team has had this year is the Candidate Issues feature. We have learned from supporting research that one of the main things people want to know related to the election is to learn objectively where candidates stand on the issues. This includes summaries of a candidate's position on specific issues as well as comparisons of candidates on these issues. One way we have started tapping into people’s specific interests is through this Issues feature that triggers on the search page for general candidate and issue queries.

People can scan through a list of issues and then tap to dive deeper and learn where that candidate stands on issues that matter to them.

Another of our launches focused on bringing more transparency to how candidate finance their campaigns. The main visualizations here show the total amount raised by the campaign with a breakdown of the percentage coming from Super PACs compared to individual campaign donations. The data was sourced from OpenSecrets a project of the Center for Responsive Politics.

Showing The Outcomes & Impact Of Elections

Our team built push notifications to alert users to the latest primary results. We also built Google Now cards that proactively serve results information to users based on their previous search history.

We also built features to help users understand the outcome of each individual primary and how those primaries were impacting the overall national contest for the nomination.